Fading Memories

This is the book that comes before Magician's Ward. In some respects, notably typesetter's accuracy, Magician's Ward is a better book — this is the famous book where a C19 housemaid exclaims 'Cool!' when she hears about a burglary, instead of the 'Coo!' the author intended...

Read more ...

Yes, I can wallow in the reading and imagining about the life of the people who could afford building the stately homes of England, and who could afford to live there. So what? I can always say it's good research for the novel-in-planning.

Read more ...

A perfect gem of a Wodehouse, one of the Blandings stories I most often reread — I was surprised I hadn't already read A Pelican at Blandings this year. But my Fading Memories log says not, so there...

Read more ...

A Pelican at Blandings is the quintessential Blandings story; Right Ho, Jeeves is the quintessential Jeeves and Wooster story.

Read more ...

Lord Ickenham is a Wodehouse character who can be counted upon to spread a bit of lightness around whenever he can escape from the stranglehold of his wife to the vast wildernesses of London.

Read more ...

When I bought a Wacom tablet my intention was to use it to sketch maps for my novel-in-progress. Quite soon I discovered that it came with an application that purported to imitate, simulate or fake real artist's media, like charcoal, paint and ink.

Read more ...

Not really a book by Godfried Bomans, but rather a collection of memories jotted down by his family and friends after his death on December 22, 1971, about two years after I was born.

Read more ...

Magician's Ward is the sequel to Mairelon the Magician. I bought the latter first, as is fitting, and just before I started with Fading Memories. At the end of Mairelon the Magician I was quite sure that Kim, the ward, would end up marrying Mairelon in something very close to the classic King Cophetua stunt.

Read more ...

Otfried is one of Germany's best known children's books authors; others are of course Michael Ende and Erich Kastner. And there is little doubt that Otfried Preußler's master work is this book, Krabat, rather limply translated into Dutch as Meester van de zwarte molen.

Read more ...

I've noted before that I'm not really all that fond of the works of the very well known and very highly regarded Dutch author Tonke Dragt. Neither her style in illustration, nor her stories have ever held me spell-bound.

Read more ...

As I said before, I rather like good buildings. Irina knows this, and when she came across this book in our local bookshop, she knew it would be a perfect birthday present.

Read more ...

My father-in-law bought, or received, this copy of The Man Upstairs in 1939, and he has apparently read it to pieces. Early Wodehouse, and this is very early, ca. 1914, is far less exuberant than the product of his old age. This is apprentice-work, not quite mature, but full of promise.

Read more ...

An early Havank, and a fun one. But a quick notice, since I've been typing a lot of notices tonight, and I'm getting a bit tired.

Read more ...

I have two editions of Pepys famous diary; that is to say, I have got two volumes from the Everyman edition, and I've got the Concise Pepys Diary. The Everyman isn't complete, of course, and it wouldn't be complete even if I had all volumes. The Concise Pepys is a cheap Wordsworth reprint of the original 1825 abridged publication.

Read more ...

This book I borrowed from a collegue of mine at Tryllian, Peter Tax. It appears to be and have been the standard text for Computer Graphics 101 at Dutch universities and technical universities, because another collegue, Remco Schaar, offered to lend me his copy, which is a new edition. Since I've never done anything academic with computers except for a course in SGML, another in SNOBOl and a last in Pascal for Linguistcs, all this stuff was new to me.

Read more ...

Jonathan Knudsen is, acknowledges the back blurb, an O'Reilly staff writer. That means he's not a subject expert, but what is technically termed a 'hack' who writes about whatever subject O'Reilly needs a book. That's not to say that he doesn't know his subject, but his book on Java Cryptography wasn't all that good and at first I thought that the book on Java 2D graphics wasn't up to scratch either.

Read more ...

I've started studying theology, having enrolled in the correspondence course of the Saint-Serge Institute, as translated and provided by the Centrum voor Theologische Vorming Johannes de Doper in Brussels. One Saturday every month I travel to Brussels to receive a wad of papers and some face-to-face tuition. I've had only one lesson yet, because Irina was away the weekend of the second lesson, and the third Saturday, coming up now, we already have exams.

Read more ...

Baen's Free Library is a great institution. Lots of titles from Baen's back catalog are available in html, word or another format, freely downloadable, freely readable. No conditions, nothing. And since I don't usually read (the covers tend to be somewhat off-putting...) what Baen publishes, this is the perfect way of making the acquaintance of what their authors write.

Read more ...

Gosh! It's almost ten years old, this book! Ten years. It's a long time in programming. When this book was published I had just started using Linux full-time, having made its first acquintance in 1993 or 1992, I don't remember exactly. At that time, I only knew Basic, Pascal, Snobol and SGML; in 1994 I started learning SQL, PL/SQL and C. And since then I've picked up Java, Python, C++ and Visual Basic. And a smattering of Bash.

Read more ...

Almost completely forgotten (although the capital of Frisia, Leeuwarden has named the streets in a new development after characters in his books), the Dutch author Havank has been treated to only one biography; this book.

Read more ...

Foley et. al. is the current incumbent of Newman and Sproull: the absolute standard text for budding graphics programmers. The field has widened, deepened and generally ballooned; that's clear just from the difference in page numbers: Foley is twice Newman.

Read more ...

I'm trying to hack Krita into submission. I want a paint application that fakes natural media and the way they work, not just the way they look. So I've started studying C++ and computer graphics, a completely new field for me.

Read more ...

Between 1935 and about 1975, Havank was the most popular, most widely read Dutch author. Therefore it's no wonder that he has never received much critical acclaim. Still, i consider him not only an author of fine, formulaic mystery novels, but also as the Dutch Wodehouse. But where Wodehouse received acclaim for his similes and virtuoso use of language, Havank was derided for his Popish boarding-school type of humour.

Read more ...

When I first read the Amazon blurb of Monstrous Regiment, I thought that this might very well be one of the better Discworld novels to appear in recent years. Terry Pratchett seems to need a fresh setting to do his best, and this book was set in a new place, with new characters, too. All set to spark the author's imagination.

Read more ...

I was very fond of Fingersmith, so I eagerly snapped up Tipping the Velvet when I had to go on a long train journey to Brussels. Well, when I say eagerly, I must admit that I spent some time looking for a copy with a different cover. While I rather like the way the right-hand girl looks at the left-hand girl (Nancy at Kitty, not vice versa), there is a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that makes this copy a little less suitable for public perusal. I blame the television, and their idea of Victorian undies, myself.

Read more ...

I bought this book in Lisbon in 1996 or so, when I was still an Oracle Software Engineer (or, in other words, a PL-SQL hacker), and wanted to learn C++. This book didn't help me then, and now, when I want again to learn C++, but for a certain project, this time, it doesn't help me either.

Read more ...

I'm not a dab hand at French — when I was in Brussels last weekend, I had a hard time getting the taxi driver to understand me, and had to resort to English, because he refused to understand Dutch. And everytime I wanted to say something in French, I could only produce a broken Greek.

Read more ...

Dorothy L. Sayers co-authored this novel with Robert Eustace (who primarily presented her with the scientific foundation for the crime). It is an experimental work, presenting the evidence for the case in the form of letters, newspaper clippings and statements.

Read more ...

I usually love the language courses from the Teach Yourself series: I must have more than twenty of the little blue, black or yellow books. But Biblical Hebrew is a bad egg. Originally published in 1955, and written in a style that was dated in 1890, H&S had no business reprinting the text photographically in 1991.

Read more ...

Being an Orthodox Christian myself, it behooves me to know something about my religion, naturally. And this book, The Orthodox Church was both my first introduction and one of the books I now and then take up again, to refresh my memory.

Read more ...

A couple of quick notes, both because I've got a big stack of books I've read cluttering up my desk, table, floor and mind, and because I want to go on with learning C++.

Read more ...

The 1907 Nobel Prize laureate Rudyard Kipling is one of the lions of the English literary history. His work, particularly his poetry, has inspired countless authors, most of whom seem to end up writing mil-sf for Baen.

Read more ...

When I studied Chinese, Sanskrit, Pali and a few other East-Asian languages in Leyden, I was pretty interested in Buddhism. One of the books I bought at that time was this volume, a nice and durable reprinto of the out-of-copyright Oxford University Press series published near the close of the nineteenth century, when scholars where scholars and books were books.

Read more ...

Is this really the first time in a year that I read something by Werumeus Buning? Probably not, it's more likely that I just assumed I'd already written a notice on what I read, because I read and re-read Werumeus Buning a lot.

Read more ...

This is the fourth Marshall Guarnaccia book, an early Magdalen Nabb, therefore. Death in Autumn is a quite perfectly formed, nicely rounded, well told and concise in plan.

Read more ...

As Dorothy L. Sayers has a woman say in Gaudy Night, once I was a scholar. I went to the University of Leyden to study sinology, capping my studies with an attempt at comparative linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman area. During my five years in Leyden, I acquired, amongst others, this translation of the Analects. I never quite got round to reading it — I always preferred Mencius to Confucius.

Read more ...

It was reading the afterword in De Psalmen that made me order this book through inter-library loan. Of course, like a fool, I started with Volume I, which is not about the psalms; I should have ordered Volume III (which is what you get when you click the buy this link; books like this are hard to get through Amazon, and the scholarly booksellers that do have a web presense don't have a search function.). Still, I'm very glad I've dipped in this book.

Read more ...

Necklace and Calabash is the last Judge Dee novel but one Robert van Gulik wrote. One year after its completion, van Gulik died from cancer, after completing Poets and Murder, the very last Judge Dee mystery. Robert van Gulik is one of those authors who show a clear progression in their work, and Necklace and Calabash is one of his best works.

Read more ...

Poetry is notoriously difficult to write about — perhaps the only form of literature that is more difficult to write about than to write. Even more difficult is to write about this book, De Psalmen which is the collection of Lloyd Haft's reworkings of, well, the Psalms.

Read more ...

I am not an ethnobotanist. What I know about organic or anorganic chemistry would fit in the RAM of a first issue ZX-80. But With Bitter Herbs They Shall Eat It still held me spellbound. The author, Timothy Johns, manages to present his difficult and to me unfamiliar subject with admirable clarity. His prose is seldom dull, the book has been organized in the most transparent fashion and the ideas he presents are thought-provoking.

Read more ...

It is always dangerous to be even moderately well-informed about a subject. It can, for instance, seriously distract from ones enjoyment of a book if one is trained as a sinologist, and the author of a book set in China manages to get almost every Chinese word wrong. This remarkable feat, far beyond the usual mangling, is the achievement of Paul Doherty. Not that there isn't plenty else to dislike.

Read more ...

What's the difference between a children's book and a book for adults? That the protagonists are children and the plot can be a bit more complex and the story a bit swifter paced if it's a children's book? That the book is a bit shorter? Year of the Griffin is a book about students at a University, so the protagonists aren't really children, but there's a lot of story going on. Anyway, people with taste read Diana Wynne Jones, no matter under which category they are packaged and marketed.

Read more ...

Jill the Reckless (UK title: The Little Warrior) is another of those Wodehouses you can read for yourself with little or no trouble: click on the 'buy this book' link and the e-text whizzes its way onto your hard-disk, gratis, courteousy of the Russian Wodehouse Society

Read more ...

Apparently, Allen Andrews is one of those one-or-two book authors that surface, get published and then disappear. That's a very great pity, because Castle Crespin has a lot of good in it.

Read more ...

We found only one Magdalen Nabb novel to take on holiday; I'd willingly swapped four Freelings for one extra Nabb. That said, I didn't feel that Death of a Dutchman was all that good.

Read more ...

When I studied Chinese in Leyden, one of the first things they told us was to go and read all of van Gulik's Judge Dee novels. The very first thing they told us was that two out of three students wouldn't even make it through the first year. I always thought the first advice to be more valuable than the second advice, which I considered to be mere sententiousness. Reading a Judge Dee book is always a good idea.

Read more ...

The American Book Center in Amsterdam is a great shop. They have lots and lots and lots of books. There SF and Fantasy shelves are so packed that it becomes almost impossible to find anything amidst the trilogies and other polylologies. And they're not too expensive, if you buy one of then ten-percent-off cards. Without one of those cards they are more expensive than W.H. Smith, also in Amsterdam. But, and this is important, so follow me closely, they also have two big bookcases with second-hand and ramsj fantasy and sf books. Better and cheaper than the English Book Exchange, also in Amsterdam, which is in itself a pretty nifty place. So, in preparation for the before-mentioned holiday to Greece, I went to the American Discount, and bought books.

Read more ...

A book with a perhaps more thoroughly Dutch athmosphere than the others, less cosmopolitan, this last of the Freelings we took on our holiday to Greece was also one of the best. A nice mystery, a very close look at our Inspector van der Valk and some excellent writing make for an engaging, fast read.

Read more ...

Diana Wynne Jones is without a doubt and by universal assent the very best author of fantastic fiction currently writing. She admits to preferring to write for children, because children can handle more complex plots and weirder distortions of the world than adults. At least, so I remember from reading an interview with her that I no longer can find. (Oh, and for the obligatory comparison with J.K. Rowling: there is no comparison. Rowling writes mundane boarding school schmaltz with a bit of mundane magic thrown in. If her characters weren't so engaging, nothing would be left. With Diana Wynne Jones you never know what's going to happen. If you like your books tame, stick to JKR, if you like real imagination, order DWJ's back catalogue when you buy this book.)

Read more ...

The contents of this volume in Elsevier's attempt at the collected works of Godfried Bomans reflect most accurately the kind of work Bomans is second best remembered for, after Eric. Fairly long, whimsical pieces of prose.

Read more ...

It used to be custom at the company where I worked to give departing collegues a book by way of souvenir. Because the company was called Tryllian, the souvenir was naturally Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. However, there were people who already had that book in profusion on their shelves, and Otto Moerbeek was one of those. And he already possessed The Art of Computer Programming, the default second choice. So we presented him with Things a computer scientist rarely thinks about. And now I have borrowed his copy and read it. In one sitting, between five o'clock in the afternoon and midnight.

Read more ...

We took four or five Nicolas Freelings with us and as many Patricia Wentworths. I read all the Freelings, and only one of the Wentworts. The other Wentworths I gave a trial, but dismissed them around page 20. This was the only one I finished...

Read more ...

In January this year we accidentally stumbled upon a chest filled with forgotten dubloons. (Virtually, that is -- a savings account we both had forgotten, even through some quite hard times. We tend to be organizationally challenged. Differently organized, that's the phrase). This windfall enabled is to go on holiday; a real, long holiday, really far away. After consultation with the children we decided to go to Kea, Greece. This resolution was taken in February or March, leaving me with a month or three to learn Greek in.

Read more ...

I know that Greek is quite a difficult language, especially for someone who isn't used to inflections and so on. But 25 years... For someone living in Greece all the time? No wonder the subtitle of this little booklet is for the linguistically challenged.

Read more ...

One of the books Irina bought in Greece. Curiously enough, I didn't buy a single book during our stay in Greece. Not because all the books were in Greek — as you can see, this one is in English, and I would have liked to pit my meagre Greek skils against a whole book, but because the selection was very limited on the small island we visited. Anyway, this book is about olive oil. And olives. With traditional recipies, no less. And written by an archaeologist.

Read more ...

Anyway, on to Blandings Castle. As the title indicates so very clearly, this book would be about Blandings Castle, that most beloved of Englands Stately Homes. Nor does the title lie, very much. Because we also get a Bobbie Wickham story, always a treat, and five Mulliner's stories about life in Hollywood. I have never been very fond of these, and upon re-reading I found them quite weak. (Still, Wodehouse presumably gives us some inside information on early Hollywood. He was there, as a screen writer, and apparently kept payed a lot while nobody used his scripts. Only when he gave an interview in which he gently derided the situation he was fired.)

Read more ...

In the seventies, Elsevier embarked upon the publication of series of books that would represent the complete works the Dutch author Godfried Bomans, who had just died in 1971. I am fairly sure that they never reached their goal of completeness. Elsevier had a reputation for starting things, and never completing them. Nowadays, Elsevier doesn't publish any literature anymore, just incredibly expensive scientific journals and scientific databanks. Their task has been picked up a few years ago, and there now exists the Complete Works of Godfried Bomans in five impressive volumes. Too expensive for me, I'm afraid, and I haven't seen them in second-hand bookshops yet.

Read more ...

One of the nice things about Nicolas Freeling's books is the depiction of the home life of his protagonists — whether it is inspector van der Valk or Henri Castang. In Tsing-Boum (really a rotten title, and as you can see, a rotten cover), an added attraction is the appearance of Ruth, the daughter of Esther, who is the murderee in this book

Read more ...

Athelstane E-Texts, which is apparently Nicholas Hodson, is an excellent institution dedicated to the making available of C19 texts. They will also produce e-texts of paper texts you have for a modest sum. However, that's not the reason I mention them here. That's because they have made available the text of Hough's 'Dr. Joliffe's Boys' -- a, to stay in the jargon, ripping example of the early English boys' school book.

Read more ...